Laura Miller

by The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

  This is a delicate subject. Tolkien has many, many devotees who fly into a fury when anyone suggests that he is not, as Tom Shippey put it in the subtitle to his book on Tolkien, the “Author of the Century.” Long stretches of Shippey’s text are given over to sniping at Tolkien’s less appreciative reviewers. The archenemy, the Sauron of the literary press in the eyes of Tolkien’s champions, is the late American critic Edmund Wilson, who dismissed The Lord of the Rings as “juvenile trash.” This, understandably, rankles the faithful, and whenever they encounter any objection like it, they rise to Tolkien’s defense. Their counterarguments usually involve testy lectures on the unparalleled complexity, consistency, and thoroughness of Tolkien’s imaginary world. He invented entire languages, for crying out loud: what contemporary novelist, however gifted, had done — or could do — that?

  This reasoning never succeeds in winning over critics and readers who just don’t have a taste for such things, the kind of people for whom Middle-earth looks like nothing more than the biggest model-railroad setup of all time. To the contrary: For those with an allergy to the fantasy genre, all this talk of the vastness of Tolkien’s invented world proves that his fans don’t really understand what makes literature literature; they think it’s a matter of the quantity, rather than the quality, of invention.

  Philip Pullman, while best known for his critique of Lewis, takes an even dimmer view of Tolkien on this count. Having concocted his own alternate universe in which to set His Dark Materials, he finds himself bemused by readers who want to explore it. “This is a particular kind of interest that I’ve never had,” he told me, “and it’s not a literary interest. I could never care less how many miles Middle-earth is from the Shire or whatever it is, or what’s the past participle of a certain word in Klingon.” When readers ask for explanations of the finer points of his imaginary cosmology, he’s flummoxed. “I haven’t got an answer because I’m not interested. It doesn’t matter. What I’m interested in is telling a story. The world is there for me to tell a story in, not for its own sake.”

  Several decades of inept, derivative fantasy novels and the nerdy reputation of Tolkien fandom have fortified the ranks of Tolkien naysayers. A lot of them find the whole Middle-earth ambience icky and a little sad. (I have a friend who refuses flat-out to read anything involving elves.) Tolkien has had many admirers of considerable intellectual stature — Auden was his great champion in the press, and the novelist Iris Murdoch sent him fan mail — but this, too, doesn’t go very far in persuading other intelligent people who can’t abide his books. Murdoch perhaps chose the wisest course when her husband, the Oxford professor John Bayley, would demand to know how she could be so enthralled by books that were so “fantastically badly written”: she’d stare at him in amazement and insist that she didn’t know what he was talking about.

  Lewis and Tolkien certainly felt that they were surrounded by hostile forces. Explaining his own love of “fairy tales” may not have been as central a project for Lewis as was defending the faith, but he gave the cause plenty of energy all the same. Tolkien, too, attempted an apologia, although criticism was really not his forte. His essay “On Fairy Stories,” apart from introducing the concept of “sub-creation,” isn’t much more developed than Lewis’s own writings on the topic — just harder to follow; Tolkien’s expository writing has none of Lewis’s limpid clarity. “I am not a critic,” he once wrote to Lewis, and “On Fairy Stories” is evidence that he understood the limits of his own talents very well. He wrote it in part because he felt that he’d been “unnaturally galvanized” into the critical role during all the time he’d spent with Lewis and “the brotherhood.”

  “On Fairy Stories” emerged in large part from the long conversations the two friends had in Lewis’s rooms. Lewis had a fathomless appetite for informal debate, the honing and teasing out of philosophical positions and arguments. He had, remember, aspired to a fellowship in philosophy before settling for English. It was via that late-night talk with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson in 1931 that he’d converted (or at least that’s what he chose to believe), and the arguments that convinced him were related to ideas that he and Tolkien shared about the merit of fairy tales.

  Lewis had been leaning back toward Christianity for a while, but he needed someone to help him dismantle the intellectual apparatus he’d constructed, years earlier, to justify his agnosticism; he was too stubborn, and too convinced of his own rationality, to toss all that away without a fight. Tolkien handed him the concept that did the trick, an idea that in one fell swoop redeemed his lifelong enthusiasm for pagan legends and conclusively refuted the naysayers who accused the two of them of playing about with a lot of childish moonshine.

  Tolkien persuaded Lewis that the stories he’d thrilled to all his life — about sacrificed and reborn gods like Balder or Dionysus — were really like echoes moving backward and sideways and sometimes even forward in time, reverberations of the one occasion when God actually sacrificed himself for mankind. The other stories, made by men, weren’t “lies” (or, as Lewis liked to call them, “lies breathed through silver”); they were shadows of the single instance when the myth “really happened.” People had kept on inventing such shadows, conjuring up imaginary worlds, because human beings were made in the image of a God who was above all a creator, an artist. With this in mind, Lewis could believe in Christ as the Son of God and not give up the other myths he loved so much — the fairy tales, the epics, the “northernness.” Those stories, like Middle-earth itself, were not “real,” but they were nevertheless “true.” They were reflections of the one and only myth that had actually unfolded in history, the one instance when the eternal, transcendent truth of God and the fallen world of reality had been one and the same.

  Chapter Twenty

  The Second Love

  Not long after Lewis had that momentous conversation with Tolkien and Dyson on Addison’s Walk, Tolkien wrote a poem entitled “Mythopoeia,” putting into verse his conviction that creating “mythic” art was a more authentic means of pursuing truth than the “dusty path” of science and progress. The poem is addressed from “Philomythus” (“Myth lover” — Tolkien) to “Misomythus” (“Myth hater” — Lewis), but what it has to say is less revealing than the fact that it was written at all. Why write a poem arguing points with a man you’ve just spent hours talking to directly, a friend you speak to at least once (and usually several times) a week?

  The practice of poetic conversation between close friends reached its zenith with the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, and with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in particular. Some of their most famous poems were extensions of their conversations; the autobiographical impulse of the early Romantics often transformed poetry into a higher form of letter. Wordsworth’s “A Complaint,” for example, written in 1806, is just that, a protest against “a change in the manner of a friend,” after Coleridge returned from a long journey withdrawn and preoccupied; Coleridge’s “To William Wordsworth,” written not long afterward, voices his renewed awe at his friend’s gifts and his own fears of artistic inadequacy. Although Tolkien had very little interest in “modern” (i.e., post-Chaucerian) poetry, and had remained impervious to the charms of Keats despite the best efforts of one of his old school friends, he could hardly help soaking up at least a little of the late-Victorian notion of the poet’s life, epitomized by the Romantics.

  As Paris in the twenties was to young writers and other bohemians of the late twentieth century, so were Romantic friendships like that between Wordsworth and Coleridge to literary men from Lewis and Tolkien’s generation. The Romantics provided a model for a certain kind of relationship (and by extension, community) based on shared creative dreams and the desire to get beyond conventional manners and roles. As often happens with all-pervading cultural fantasies, even if you’re too embarrassed, too modest, or even too cynical to invoke the model openly, it’s still hard to escape it entirely. Writing is a lonely profession, especially when
you feel out of step with your time, whether you believe you’re ahead of it (as Wordsworth and Coleridge did) or behind it (Tolkien and Lewis). The later Romantics — Keats, Shelley, and Byron — may have racked up more dramatic, glamorous histories than Wordsworth and Coleridge, but none of them could claim a more consuming, fertile, or tempestuous collaboration. In their heyday, these two friends managed to make writing an almost communal activity.

  They met in 1795, and for a little less than a decade they were united in an effort to revolutionize English poetry. At the peak of their friendship, Coleridge and Wordsworth worked side by side at the same table in various rural cottages throughout England, but especially in Coleridge’s cottage in Somerset. They read their work aloud to each other, exchanged criticism, and even contributed lines or entire stanzas to each other’s poems. The foundation of their bond was Coleridge’s certitude that in Wordsworth he had found the consummate literary genius of their time, the man destined to write a long, comprehensive, philosophical poem that would champion a new way of life and in doing so change the world. With Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, and a rotating selection of sympathetic friends, the two men went on epic walks through the countryside, fervently talking of ideas and poetry and opening their hearts and minds to the natural world in search of the same emotional and spiritual transport that, a hundred years later, Lewis would name Joy.

  While their talents weren’t of the caliber of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s, Lewis and Tolkien were as susceptible to this template of literary friendship as anyone; both certainly had thought of themselves as poets rather than novelists in their youth. Furthermore, Lewis had been calling himself a “Romantic” since long before he met Tolkien. He had devoured the poetry of Shelley and Keats as a boy. After pooh-poohing Wordsworth through his youth, Lewis came to admire and identify with the poet in his twenties; when asked late in life to list the ten books that had most influenced him, Lewis included The Prelude, Wordsworth’s epic, autobiographical poem (addressed, naturally, to Coleridge).

  Like Lewis, Wordsworth looked back on a youth when “meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight” inspired a kind of ecstasy, “the glory and the freshness of a dream,” only to realize that this capacity had withered in adulthood: “there hath past away a glory from the earth.” Eventually, Lewis found the solution to what he called his “Wordsworthian predicament” in religion, and he believed that the author of The Prelude would have found renewal in Christianity, too, “if only he could have believed it.” Even the title of Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy, is taken from a Wordsworth sonnet.

  In other aspects, however, Lewis played Coleridge to Tolkien’s Wordsworth. He was a great talker — if not so great as Coleridge, who bedazzled everyone who heard him — and he had a tendency to monopolize conversations. (Tolkien, like Wordsworth, was the more reserved and saturnine of the pair.) The popularity of Lewis as an Oxford lecturer, radio essayist, and apologist paralleled Coleridge’s success during his occasional stints as a public speaker; “the people here absolutely consume me,” Coleridge complained to a friend after a bequest enabled him to resign a position as a minister. Both Lewis and Coleridge cared little for clothes and their own appearance, and both relished herculean walks that would have exhausted mere mortals; Coleridge was known to cover forty miles in a day without thinking much of it.

  Coleridge, like Lewis, was a precipitator, very keen on pulling groups of like-minded friends together to see what happened, and he had a knack for caricature and social satire that he sometimes exercised to his own disadvantage. And while Coleridge never went through a period of serious religious doubt (he was always a passionate Christian, if often an unconventional one), he shared Lewis’s conviction that the splendors of nature must necessarily point toward something beyond it. “My mind,” he wrote to a friend, “feels as if it ached to behold & know something great — something one & indivisible — and it is only in the faith of this that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns give me the sense of sublimity or majesty! — But in this faith all things counterfeit infinity!”

  Above all, Coleridge was an enthusiast; he devoted himself to encouraging and celebrating Wordsworth when his friend was still a relatively untried poet with a lesser reputation. Lewis tirelessly coaxed Tolkien to finish and publish his writings; Tolkien, like Wordsworth, tended to fuss interminably over small imperfections and would have kept much of his work to himself if not prodded to let it go. As it was, The Prelude (which Wordsworth originally conceived of as an introduction to the great work Coleridge expected of him — the great work itself, to be called The Recluse, he never completed) was not published until after Wordsworth’s death. Tolkien described himself as “a notorious beginner of enterprises and non-finisher,” and blamed this on the difficulty he had in concentrating. Yet he could spend days fretting over the astronomical details in The Lord of the Rings, worrying about getting the phases of the moon just right instead of thinking about how to get to the next scene. If the result feels more persuasive because of his meticulousness, it’s only due to Lewis’s nagging that we have an end product at all.

  Coleridge is probably the greatest “non-finisher” in English literature, more famous, perhaps, for what he didn’t do (complete “Kubla Khan” or “Christabel”) than for what he did. This is an occupational hazard for artists whose efforts are fueled exclusively by gusts of creative inspiration; gusts are by definition brief. In Coleridge’s case, his changeable nature was compounded by opium addiction, a habit he fell into partly for medical reasons (laudanum was routinely prescribed by physicians in those days) and partly to escape from an unhappy marriage. The drug ruined his life, aggravating all the traits that made him uniquely exasperating even to his best friends. “He talks very much like an angel,” said one of the poet’s patrons toward the end, “and he does nothing at all.” Opium magnified Coleridge’s tendency toward self-pity and kept him from dealing sensibly with what he regarded as the great torments of his later years: his unrequited love for Wordsworth’s sister-in-law and his eventual estrangement from Wordsworth.

  Finishing certainly wasn’t Lewis’s problem; considering the incessant demands and disruptions of his domestic situation, he was superhumanly productive, even during the worst days of Mrs. Moore’s decline. He wrote all seven of the Narnia books in a little over two years. During the same period he was hospitalized with a streptococcal infection (the one attributed by his doctor to exhaustion) and coped with a crisis in Mrs. Moore’s health that required moving her to a nursing home. He handled that task alone; Warnie, as was his wont when the going got tough, was off recovering from one of his inopportune alcoholic binges.

  Lewis dealt with all this on top of the regular duties of an Oxford tutor. Over the previous two decades, he had produced The Allegory of Love, the three science-fiction novels known as the “Space Trilogy,” several books of apologetics and the radio talks that spawned them, and many articles and (often unsigned) reviews for newspapers and other popular publications. Tolkien, by contrast, had published only The Hobbit, which was a success — but not on the level of, say, Mere Christianity — and he kept getting stuck in the midsection of The Lord of the Rings. The two of them had cooked up a scheme in the early 1930s to write a “thriller” apiece (Lewis picked space travel as his theme; Tolkien’s was time travel), and whereas Lewis had fulfilled the plan in triplicate, Tolkien had only “a fragment” of a novel to show for himself.

  This, the two men’s various biographers agree, bothered Tolkien. That is the problem with literary friendships: the commonalities that foster them can also lead to comparison, competition, friction. The fastidious Tolkien was further annoyed by Lewis’s authorial sloppiness, his uncorrected mistakes and inconsistencies, which were, like many of Coleridge’s faults, the result of an endearingly wholehearted forward momentum that blithely swept over the sort of minor problems that would inevitably trip up Tolkien.

  Lewis was “a man of immense power and industry,
” Tolkien wrote to a reader who had noticed some correspondences between the space trilogy and The Lord of the Rings, “but at last my slower and more meticulous (as well as more indolent and less organized) machine has produced its effort.” Until it did, however, only a writer of angelic forbearance could have witnessed his friend’s blossoming career without a twinge of envy. It didn’t help that when Lewis incorporated some little element of Tolkien’s mythology into his own fiction, he’d often get it wrong, such as misspelling “Númenor” (an Atlantean civilization from the distant past of Middle-earth) as “Numinor.” That, and the elvish-inflected names that Lewis invented for the supernatural entities in his science-fiction novels, irritated his friend, though he knew Lewis intended it as a tribute.

  What sustained the Tolkien and Lewis friendship was their affection for old things and old ways of life, and above all their love of old literary forms. This, too, was something they had in common with the Romantics. In the preface to Lyrical Ballads, a groundbreaking collection of poems by both Wordsworth and Coleridge, published in 1798, Wordsworth spoke for both men in denouncing “poets, who think that they are conferring honor upon themselves and their art in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression in order to furnish food for fickle tastes and fickle appetites of their own creation.” This expresses pretty well how Lewis felt about modernism, personified for him by the poet T. S. Eliot, whose work he once repudiated as “a very great evil.”